The reason was not far to seek; the arrival of the giant rocket and the dawn of the Space Age had turned men’s minds to other worlds. Realization that the human race would soon be able to leave the planet of its birth prompted the inevitable questions: Where’s everyone, and when may we expect visitors? There was also the hope, though it was seldom spelled out in as many words, that benevolent creatures from the stars might help mankind heal its numerous self-inflicted wounds and save it from future disasters.
Any student of psychology could have predicted that so profound a need would be swiftly satisfied. During the last half of the twentieth century, there were literally thousands of reports of spacecraft sightings from every part of the globe. More than that, there were hundreds of reports of ‘close encounters’ – actual meetings with extraterrestrial visitors, frequently embellished by tales of celestial joyrides, abductions, and even honeymoons in space. The fact that, over and over again, these were demonstrated to be lies or hallucinations did nothing to deter the faithful. Men who had been shown cities on the far side of the Moon lost little credibility even when Orbiter surveys and Apollo revealed no artifacts of any kind; ladies who married Venusians were still believed when that planet, sadly, turned out to be hotter than molten lead.
By the time the ALAA published its report no reputable scientist – even among those few who had once espoused the idea-believed that UFOs had any connection with extraterrestrial life or intelligence. Of course, it would never be possible to prove that; any one of those myriad sightings, over the last thousand years, might have been the real thing. But as time went by, and satellite cameras and radars scanning the entire heavens produced no concrete evidence, the general public lost interest in the idea. The cultists, of course, were not discouraged, but kept the faith with their newsletters and books, most of them regurgitating and embellishing old reports long after they had been discredited or exposed.
When the discovery of the Tycho monolith – TMA-I – was finally announced, there was a chorus of ‘I told you so’s!’ It could no longer be denied that there had been visitors to the Moon – and presumably to the Earth as well – a little matter of three million years ago. At once, UFOs infested the heavens again; though it was odd that the three independent national tracking systems, which could locate anything in space larger than a ballpoint pen, were still unable to find them.
Rather quickly, the number of reports dropped down to the ‘noise level’ once more – the figure that would be expected, merely as a result of the many astronomical, meteorological, and aeronautical phenomena constantly occurring in the skies.
But now it had started all over again. This time, there was no mistake; it was official. A genuine UFO was on its way to Earth.
Sightings were reported within minutes of the warning from Leonov; the first close encounters were only a few hours later. A retired stockbroker, walking his bulldog on the Yorkshire Moors, was astonished when a disk-shaped craft landed beside him and the occupant – quite human, except for the pointed ears – asked the way to Downing Street. The contactee was so surprised that he was only able to wave his stick in the general direction of Whitehall; conclusive proof of the meeting was provided by the fact that the bulldog now refused to take his food.
Although the stockbroker had no previous history of mental illness, even those who believed him had some difficulty in accepting the next report. This time it was a Basque shepherd on a traditional mission; he was greatly relieved when what he had feared to be border guards turned out to be a couple of cloaked men with piercing eyes, who wanted to know the way to the United Nations Headquarters.
They spoke perfect Basque – an excruciatingly difficult tongue with no affinity to any other known language of mankind. Clearly, the space visitors were remarkable linguists, even if their geography was oddly deficient.
So it went on, case after case. Very few of the contactees were actually lying or insane; most of them sincerely believed their own stories, and retained that belief even under hypnosis. And some were just victims of practical jokes or improbable accidents – like the unlucky amateur archaeologists who found the props that a celebrated science-fiction moviemaker had abandoned in the Tunisian desert almost four decades earlier.
Yet only at the beginning – and at the very end – was any human being genuinely aware of his presence; and that was because he so desired it.
The world was his to explore and examine as he pleased, without restraint or hindrance. No walls could keep him out, no secrets could be hidden from the senses he possessed. At first he believed that he was merely fulfilling old ambitions, by visiting the places he had never seen in that earlier existence. Not until much later did he realize that his lightning-like sallies across the face of the globe had a deeper purpose.
In some subtle way, he was being used as a probe, sampling every aspect of human affairs. The control was so tenuous that he was barely conscious of it; he was rather like a hunting dog on a leash, allowed to make excursions of his own, yet nevertheless compelled to obey the overriding wishes of his master.
The pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the moon-washed snows of Everest – these were choices of his own. So were some art galleries and concert halls; though he would certainly, on his own initiative, never have endured the whole of the Ring.
Nor would he have visited so many factories, prisons, hospitals, a nasty little war in Asia, a racecourse, a complicated orgy in Beverly Hills, the Oval Room of the White House, the Kremlin archives, the Vatican Library, the sacred Black Stone of the Kaabah at Mecca.
There were also experiences of which he had no clear memory, as if they had been censored – or he was being protected from them by some guardian angel. For example -What was he doing at the Leakey Memorial Museum, in Olduvai Gorge? He had no greater interest in the origin of Man than any other intelligent member of the species H. sapiens, and fossils meant nothing to him. Yet the famous skulls, guarded like crown jewels in their display cases, aroused strange echoes in his memory, and an excitement for which he was unable to account. There was a feeling of d�ja vu stronger than any he had ever known; the place should be familiar – but something was wrong. It was like a house to which one returns after many years, to find that all the furniture has been changed, the walls moved, and even the stairways rebuilt.
It was bleak, hostile terrain, dry and parched. Where were the lush plains and the myriad fleet-footed herbivores that had roamed across them, three million years ago?
Three million years. How had he known that?
No answer came from the echoing silence into which he had thrown the question. But then he saw, once more looming before him, a familiar black rectangular shape. He approached, and a shadowy image appeared in its depths, like a reflection in a pool of ink.
The sad and puzzled eyes that stared back from beneath that hairy, receding forehead looked beyond him into a future they could never see. For he was that future, a hundred thousand generations further down the stream of time.
History had begun there; that at least he now understood. But how – and above all, why – were secrets still withheld from him?
But there was one last duty, and that was hardest of all. He was still sufficiently human to put it off until the very end.
Now what’s she up to? the duty nurse asked herself, zooming the TV monitor onto the old lady. She’s tried lots of tricks, but this is the first time I’ve seen her talking to her hearing aid, for goodness sake. I wonder what she’s saying?
The microphone was not sensitive enough to pick up the words, but that scarcely seemed to matter. Jessie Bowman had seldom looked so peaceful and content. Though her eyes were closed, her entire face was wreathed in an almost angelic smile while her lips continued to form whispered words.
And then the watcher saw something that she tried hard to forget because to report it would instantly disqualify her in the nursing profession. Slowly and jerkily, the comb lying on the bedside table raised itself in the air as if lifted by clumsy, invisible fingers.
On the first attempt, it missed; then, with obvious difficulty, it began to part the long silver strands, pausing sometimes to disentangle a knot.
Jessie Bowman was not speaking now, but she continued to smile. The comb was moving with more assurance, and no longer in abrupt, uncertain jerks.